What makes any movie fail or succeed at the box office can often be down any number of factors; it's specific qualities, good or bad are often besides the point. Mostly what it comes down to is timing. When it's released, what it's competition is, what the mood of the audience is at the time, and how well it's promoted.
There's plenty of examples one could cite of cult classic and indeed just straight-up classic movies that were either box office failures, or at least disappointments on release. There's also plenty of box office hits that faded from memory and relevance within a year or two. Fads are like that.
Back in the old days movies could run for months or years, affording them much more opportunity to earn back their money over the long run. These days it's far tougher with the opening weekend treated as an all or nothing gamble before the movie gets dumped onto streaming after just 3 months.
Because of this and other reasons, I've long since lost interest in box office performance as a metric of value. Indeed I'm fairly convinced that TFA's runaway success is partly to blame for the rest of the movies being so rushed and all over the place. Had they been more conservative and patient, not so greedy to break more records, the movies may not have been the mess that they were (and this from someone that liked most of them.)
We'll have to wait and see how this movie does, but I'm a little sceptical about the motivation behind it. It feels like they're rushing again.
